Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 01, 2012 @10:53AM
from the oh-you-actually-big-tease dept.

hypnosec writes "Kim Dotcom has let out more information about the launch of Megaupload's successor Mega, which he claims will be 'bigger, better, faster, stronger, [and] safer.' Mega is currently looking for partners willing to provide servers, support and connectivity to become 'Mega Storage Nodes.' The prime requirement, according to Dotcom, is that the servers should be located outside the U.S. and that the companies should also be based outside of the U.S. For this reason, Dotcom has decided that the new service will be launching with 'Me.ga' domain name."

Seems like our IP laws are really helping our industries right now. Soon all data centers will be located out of the reach of *AA ?

Out of reach? Given the way the US is exporting its IP laws with some serious diplomatic pressure... if SOCOM can rustle up someone to go in and do a raid where they're not supposed to be, I wouldn't put that past the influence of the *AAs.

American foreign policy is in large part driven by what those guys want. To the point that documents written by industry are part of governmental briefings -- even if the conclusions in the document is entirely in the service of the interests of the *AAs.

Welcome to the oligarchy. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that it's the industry calling the shots, not the government.

To those of you in the MPAA, RIAA, and software, mobile phone, and ISP industries. You cannot fight this.

Sure they can fight this. They have been fighting since Gutenberg. OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law [wikipedia.org] says :Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books.And :Popes conceded at different times to certain printers the exclusive privilege of printing for specific terms (rarely exceeding 14 years)That is 50 years after Gutenberg started printing.

So don't say they can't fight it. They have been fighting it for a LOT longer then you and me are around and they will continue fighting it.

There's a procedure to follow, though. Anti-crypto laws are tricky things to get through politically. Doable, but it needs a good excuse, and 'Hollywood isn't rich enough' is not going to do it easily. The obvious justification is child porn. The mere suspicion of child pornography is toxic today, and any acts justified as opposing child porn are near-impossible to argue against without being branded a pedophile-enabler.

In theory, yes - though it'd take some time to be implimented. It'd be a big step though, as it would undermine all trust in the DNS system, and that is something the US can't afford to do right now. The UN is already pressing for a more multinational management - an abuse of power by the US would only prove them right.

Imagine Dropbox with mandatory encryption. True cypherpunks would argue that everything should have always been like this anyway.

There are reasons why this isn't the default -- Dropbox relies on de-duplication to reduce their storage and bandwith costs.Encrypting the data before upload would remove that possibility.Not that it's not worth doing -- but it will be more expensive than a non-secure equivalent.

I just pointed out to a friend of mine in I.T., last week, that it seems odd how U.S. govt. largely forgot about their interest in controlling encryption. I mean, it wasn't THAT long ago that they were still forcing Microsoft to make a separate version of Internet Explorer because it was a federal crime to export it with 128-bit encryption capabilities in it. And remember how worked up they got over the Pretty Good Privacy software when it was first released to the public?

But despite CPUs getting many times more powerful and the "common man" encrypting things with 1024 bit encryption in many cases as default settings in programs, you don't really hear a peep out of govt. about it these days.

I have to assume this means they're capable of breaking it on-demand, so they're happy to let people use the stuff freely and get a false sense of security. Maybe there's a back-door or flaw in the math the NSA knows about, or they simply have such massive super-computer data centers at their disposal now, they can brute force break it? I don't know... but it's HIGHLY unusual for government to just quit concerning itself with something it was really paranoid about just years earlier, when it purports to make sure they can't view the contents of communications between people.

Sure, the MAFIAA can trawl file sharing sites and get the password to the key. But they can't trace it back to who uploaded it, so they can't sue you. And Mega can't know that you've posted the key, so Mega can't know what's in the encrypted file. So they can't sue Mega either.

Wanting to get paid for your work is not greedy. Charging many multiples of a product's 'fair market value' by leveraging legislative or other control channels you possess (aka. rent extraction), or preventing people from legally-mandated fair access to content they have bought and paid for, is both greedy and wicked.

The public does not make nice distinctions between "oh, the restrictions on this IP here are pretty reasonable while those on that IP over there are just crazy". To the vast majority of people, IP and copyright are fungible concepts that do not vary from one product or author to another. Most readers had a very good idea of what was fair (checking out a book from a library, lending it to a friend, selling it to a used bookstore) and what wasn't (printing copies of books and selling them for personal profit, stealing ideas or entire texts without attribution). Those institutions that dominated the IP regime in the United States for decades (the MPAA and the RIAA, among others) decided that they were going to play hardball and lock things down so hard that people should consider themselves fortunate to be allowed to read their own books or listen to their own music. They lost. And then they doubled-down and lost again, and again and again. Now that they've finally screwed themselves (and the basic idea of Intellectual Property among a whole generation) to the point where they can see their own deaths approaching, NOW they're suddenly crying, "Omg! Won't someone think of the poor IP creators?". (The IP creators who the corporations screw over every chance they get.)

Too bad. They blew it. Do I feel bad for those talented folks who are going to find it difficult or impossible to make a living on their work? Do I mourn the creations that might have been but now never will be? Absolutely. But the bloated corporate monstrosities that killed the very of idea of decent copyright? They can burn, and when they run up to me begging, I may laugh, but I certainly won't put the fire out, not even if it gives me a chance to piss on them.

I'll just leave your false equivalence between digital and physical goods to lie there and rot, as it deserves.

The USA is not alone in this bullshit by any stretch. There are just as many problems in the EU right now. ALL governments right now are corrupt and owned by very powerful groups with intense interests in protecting the revenue from their copyrights.

Nobody wants to change, and there are a bunch of rent seeking sociopaths that are trying to kill freedom as quickly as possible, because it is the most direct route to having the control required to protect their business models and assets.

To say it is the USA only, gives a huge pass to those governments in the EU.